"Two minutes!" Lishka shrieked, clawing at the crimson digital glow on her wrist. Her mascara ran in black gouges down her cheeks, mingling with seawater and grease from the laundry vents. "He rigged it to me when I slipped into his private study! I had to crawl through three elevator shafts! We're all going to be blown into bloody chunks! Move, you idiot cow, run!" Kovanya did not run. She did not even swing her feet off the bed. She merely pulled a monogrammed silk sleep mask down to the tip of her nose, squinting at the flashing red numerals with profound irritation. "Must you scream at that pitch before nine in the morning? It vibrates the bridge of my nose." "It’s dynamite!" Lishka screamed, voice cracking into a jagged squeak. "It isn't dynamite, you dramatic badger," Kovanya muttered, adjusting her feather pillow so her neck rested at a precisely horizontal angle. She pointed a lazy, manicured finger toward the gilded molding on the ceiling. "Look at the woodwork. Hand-carved walnut from the southern valleys. Look at the wool rugs. Vossig is an egomaniac who charges fifty rubles for a pot of weak tea. Do you honestly think a creature that vain would coat his imported wallpaper in your shredded intestines? The cleaning fees alone would ruin his fiscal quarter." Cibbo poked his head out from beneath a mahogany commode, his eyes darting like trapped beetles. He threw a scrap of moldy hardtack to the mongrel huddled against his shins. "She's deduced the munitions loadout! She's calculating the chemical dispersant by factoring in bourgeois maintenance budgets! A genius, an absolute prodigy of counter-intelligence!" "It's an acoustic stun charge," Kovanya yawned, rolling onto her stomach. Her heavy linen nightgown pooled around her like a puddle of milk. "Designed to burst eardrums and crack ribs without scorching the upholstery. Bramen, darling?" "Yes, my jewel?" Bramen stepped forward instantly. His broad, soot-marked hands, usually coarse from hauling river ice through the fog, hovered gently over her blanketed form. "Muffle the nuisance. Her arm is vibrating, and the red light is ruining my ambient lighting." "Consider it handled," Bramen beamed. Lishka thrashed, her muddy boots kicking against the floor. "Don't touch me, you ox! We need bolt cutters! We need to chop my hand off! Find an axe!" Bramen did not fetch an axe. With the casual, effortless leverage he used to heft three-hundred-pound slabs of frozen lake-crust, he planted one heavy boot beside Lishka’s ribs, scooped her by the waist, and dumped her flat onto the floorboards beside the settee. Before she could bite his thumb, he swept four massive, king-sized comforters—stuffed to bursting with northern eiderdown—off the spare racks. "Lie still, sister-in-law," Bramen advised cheerfully. "Kovanya knows fabric better than anyone in the district. She has very soft standards." "No! You're suffocating me!" Lishka wailed as Bramen piled eight more quilted duvets on top of her. "I crawled through the filth while you sat on your fat tail! I won the key! I solved the maze!" Bramen topped the mountain of goose feathers with three goose-down bolsters, pressing down with his thick forearm until only Lishka's red, furious nose peeked out from the linen drift. Her left arm was buried under twenty pounds of luxury batting. `00:00:05` `00:00:02` `00:00:00` *THUMP.* A concussive thud struck the floorboards, like a sack of turnips dropped onto thick pile carpet three floors down. The comforters swelled upward by four inches, then settled. A faint puff of sulfur-scented dust coughed out from between two gold seams, instantly drowned by the smell of dried lavender sachets. From beneath the mass of blankets came a muffled, high-pitched whimper. Lishka kicked her way out, gasping, listing sideways like a drunk sailor as her eardrums buzzed. The cuff had snapped into three twisted segments, blackened and harmless, dangling from her bruised but entirely intact wrist. Her hair was completely coated in white down, making her resemble a plucked, static-shocked hen. She looked at her whole, unsevered fingers. Then she looked at Kovanya, who was currently inspecting a hangnail on her left thumb. "You..." Lishka choked, her voice a hollow rasp over the tinnitus whining in her skull. "You didn't move. You didn't even drop your tea." "I told you it was a concussion charge," Kovanya said, rolling back onto her side with a small, satisfied stretch. "All that scurrying, Lishka. All that sprinting down service corridors, ruining your knees, plotting marriages to decrepit bureaucrats who smell like boiled cabbage. And what did it buy you? Feather dust in your sinuses and ringing ears. You exhaust yourself for nothing." Lishka sat on the floor, hands twitching against her knees, her mouth pulled taut in humiliation. Tears cut clean lines through the soot on her cheeks. She had risked her skin, bled through her stockings, schemed for every inch of survival—and her sister had defeated the death machine by simply refusing to get out of bed. "The card," Cibbo squeaked, pointing a trembling, wrench-bearing hand toward the rug. "The black master card! She dropped it!" Bramen stooped, his thick fingers plucking the sleek black plastic from the fibers. The gold serpent gleamed under the brass chandelier. "Shall I use it on the hallway door, Kovanya? We could slip past the guards while the cleansing alarms sound in the lower quarters." Kovanya wrinkled her nose in disgust. "Go out there? Into the drafts? The floor is wet out there, Bramen. Cibbo smells like stale pond water, and Lishka is shedding goose down everywhere. I am not traipsing through corridors like an unregistered dockworker." "What else can we do with it?" Bramen asked, tilting his head with absolute, devoted curiosity. Kovanya gestured toward the brass service console set into the wall beside the mahogany headboard. Beneath the row of buttons for hot water and extra towels sat a locked magnetic slit marked: *EXECUTIVE CLEARANCE ONLY: PLATINUM TIER GASTRONOMY.* "Swipe it there," Kovanya commanded. "I want the smoked sturgeon, the buttered rolls with plum preserves, and a samovar of roasted chicory. If they bring the preserves cold, Bramen, I authorize you to break the server's thumb." "Right away, my love," Bramen said, beaming. He dragged the black card through the scanner. The brass mechanism purred. A sequence of relays clicked behind the wallpaper, deep and rhythmic, like a ship's engine turning over in grease. *PING.* Across the room, the oak paneling parted with a smooth hydraulic hiss, revealing the shaft of the Sanatorium's automated dumbwaiter. But instead of a polished brass trolley loaded with cloches and warm brioche, a heavy, iron cage shuddered to a halt in the opening. Inside stood Chairman Vossig. His tailored charcoal suit was ripped at the left lapel, exposing gray wool padding, and a crust of dried blood tracked from his temple into his thin, slicked mustache. In his gloved hands, he held a heavy pneumatic spear-gun, its triple-barbed steel harpoon aimed directly between Kovanya’s eyes. His chest heaved with ragged breaths, his left eyelid twitching in rapid spasms. "I built this tomb with my own hands," Vossig snarled, his knuckle whitening around the spear-gun's trigger. "And you ordered breakfast?"

Ticking Clocks and High Tea